A Rainy Saturday Book Review: The Gone Away World By Nick Harkaway

I understand that it might not be raining wherever your iPhone’s GPS  thinks you are. That’s ok. It’s rainy here and what better can there be to do than nurse your red-haired wife back from a ghastly, cringing stomach flu whilst firing together a nice positive review on a big release Sci-Fi epic.

In recent times, there’s been a couple of big pure Sci-Fi novels released onto the stacks. Anathem by Neal Stephenson and “The Gone Away World” by Nick Harkaway. I’m slugging through Anathem as we speak. It’s good. It’s dense. A review will surely come. It rains quite a lot here high up on the Atlantic Coast.

You know right away that the publisher of “The Gone Away World” thought quite highly of Nick’s book because of the cover. It’s lovely pink and felty. The book is covered in a soft felt that feels great on the fingertips but has the unfortunate quality of also being extremely magnetic to cat hair. The cats that live here seem to know this of course and make it their daily business, if not their very mission in life, to sit on it.

So the publisher liked Nick’s book. Covered it in touchy softness. Released it in hardcover (pretty good for his first book) and was even so bold as to just put the name of the book and it’s author’s on the front. There are no graphics of space maidens, colliding spaceships, or planets undergoing fiery collisions from hurtling comets. The book’s contents would speak for itself.

As I have mentioned above, this is Nick’s first book. It’s always hard to be too judgemental of a first effort, especially of a book so incredibly ambitious. Nick took a mighty swing here. He didn’t choke up on the bat. He planted his feet and thought deep centerfield. Just about got all of it too.

Nick Harkaway’s writing reminds me a great deal of the younger work of the aforementioned Mr. Stephenson. He has a great passion. He is funny. He rambles excessively. There’s an amazing array of stream of consciousness thinking here that I was quite impressed, amazed and even occasionally bored by. I can see that Nick’s editor was very wise here though. Sometimes you just have to let the horse run. Nick has blazing talent. Since the entire work feels to have been written in one sitting by a man not completely in control of the power of his gifts, where do you edit?

The book’s plot details the fantastic, more than just a bit over the top, exploits of the Haulage and Hazmat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company. A band of predictably eccentric men and women paid to fix the unfixable. All the characters except the narrator seem far larger than life. They are supermen and superwomen.

I wished at times that the characters were a bit more grounded in Newtonian physics. The story here is very interesting. The book begins in the description of a world victim to a most terrible technological disaster. Someone has figured out a way to create a weapon that removes the quantum information out of matter. This essentially creates large voids of empty. To the weapons creators, this is a lovely thing. What you want to destroy simply ceases to be. No muss, no fuss, no fallout.

Unfortunately, what works so cleanly in a lab or in computer simulation often goes very badly out in the field. The Gone Away Bombs do indeed make people and structures and sheep (you’ll find out about sheep) disappear. What remains though is a fallout of Stuff or a kind of pure liquid probability that makes what is left of the world after the Gone Way War a place where the thoughts of man create reality where the Stuff is free to pool and drift and seep.

There is much commentary on the thoughts of mankind in Nick’s work. You can imagine the kinds of things that could be born out of pure possibility from the minds of war survivors.

The early pages describe the mission the Haulage and Hazmat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company must embark on. The world has been stabilized by a chemical that flows from a giant pipe that entwines what remains of the world. Where you are close to the pipe, there is normal reality. Where you are away from the pipe, the world is uncertain and very dangerous. As the book begins, the pipe is on fire. The world is in deep trouble.

After the initial setup, the book switches to flashback and tells the story of the narrator, his best friend Gonzo and the rest of the team. I thought at first that this length of flashback was excessive and I was getting pretty antsy to get back to the main story. You’ll soon realize though that the flashback and it’s length is essential to the telling of the story. Push through it. Slug it out. It’s worth it. There’s plenty of fun along the way.

Nick Harkaway has impressive, mainstream, New York Times bestseller level talent. I love it when guys and gals with the big literary guns point their gifts at Sci-Fi. Nick could have followed in the footsteps of his famous father, John le Carré and written something safe. What he did instead was paint a picture of a world and of characters that could only be bound in a book with a cover of felt the color of hot pink. This is no vanilla adventure. This book is a big concept, raw and very impressive first glimpse of a writer that will only get better. When your first work starts out this good, so full of passion and spunk, we can barely imagine what is ahead.